Online ramblings and other work displacement activities by writer David Bishop

Monday, January 18, 2016

My PLR top ten titles for July 2014 - June 2015

Every year the Public Lending Right sends registered authors a statement
estimating how many times their books were borrowed from UK libraries.
To compensate for lost sales, the PLR pays about six pence per loan.
There's a maximum payment threshold [£6600] to prevent bestselling
authors from draining the PLR's precious coffers of cash.

About 22,000 authors will get payments for the most recent PLR
period [July 2014 - June 2015], with about 200 on the maximum of £6600.
The fate of the PLR is in flux, as cash-strapped councils close libraries and eBooks alter reading habits. But
authors still welcome this new year bonus.

It is free to register your books for PLR - just go here.
Even if you only wrote [or drew, in the case of comics artist] part of a
collection, you can still register your bit. I represent a tiny 3% of
the Heavy Metal Dredd graphic novel, but it makes me a few pennies.

I’m a minnow for PLR payments, never getting more than £500
in any given year. With my focus on screenwriting since 2007, and no new
novels published in nearly a decade, the size of my payment keeps tumbling as my dog-eared tomes disappear from libraries.

My 2000AD-related tomes dominate the list this time, no doubt thanks to the recent Future Shock documentary and the 2012 Dredd movie starring Karl Urban.

My last published novel - Warhammer tome A Massacre
in Marienburg - remains in the top five here. Only one of
my novels remains in physical print, Doctor Who: Amorality Tale, thanks to a new edition by BBC Books in early 2015 - but many are still available as
eBooks.

Anyway, here are my top ten tomes
for July
2013 - June 2014 (with previous year's placing in brackets). NOTE: this list was edited after the PLR office issued amended statements in March 2016:-